The death of an author rarely generates much news coverage nowadays, especially when the writer's best work is more than a half-century old. But Harper Lee is a special case, and her most famous novel To Kill a Mockingbird is not just widely read, but beloved. I frequently hear it mentioned when people list their favorite books, and its appeal is deeply felt even by those who pay little attention to the shifting tastes of modern fiction.

Yet for all that, it is a strange book,luminous in its depiction of Southernlife, but stubbornly resistant to thekind of pigeonholing practiced by theliterary establishment.

Frequently when someone asks meabout a book I’m reading, the questionis phrased as a matter of classification."What kind of book is that?" is a typicalinquiry. And I can hardly object to sucha question. We live in a commerce-drivenculture that assigns every book a category, and sometimes a sub-category if not a sub-sub-category.

I’m reminded of the British interlocutor who knowingly refers to the'lower-upper-middle class' and somehow manages to convey a very precise grasp of what each of these conflicting modifiers signifies. Books, in the modern day, are much the same—so much so that I would hardly blink an eye if someone referred to a new novel as a zombie romantic comedy mystery or a fantasy time travel cowboy story. In the jargon of marketing, the publishing houses are simply exploring the potential for category expansion.

With that in mind, I ask the obviousquestion: What kind of book did thelate Ms. Lee give us with her To Killa Mockingbird? And I find it surprisinglydifficult to answer that query. This bookis such a staple of classroom assignmentsand recommended reading lists, thatreaders have come to ignore how strangeand anomalous it actually is.

I suspect that most readers of this novelrecall the courtroom scenes most vividly. An Alabama lawyer, Atticus Finch, takes on the responsibility of defending an African-American, Tom Robinson, who is accused of raping a young white woman, Mayella Ewell. The story is set in the mid-1930s, and Finch faces almost insurmountable odds in attempting to secure and acquittal for a black man from a white jury. When Lee’s novel first arrived in bookstores on July 11, 1960, that was the most timely aspect of her story.

Just a few weeks before the book’s publication, President Eisenhower had signed into the law the Civil Rights Act of 1960, which aimed to remove voter registration abuses in communities very similar to the one depicted in Lee’s novel. But even as To Kill a Mockingbird climbed up the bestseller list, stories of conflict and reprisals continued to dominate the daily news. On May 28, Martin Luther King had been acquitted by an all-white jury in Alabama, but he was arrested again in October during a sit-in at an Atlanta department store, and released on bond from Reidsville prison only after the intervention of Robert Kennedy.

When we focus on this core plot, we arereminded both of the courtroom proceduralstory, a popular subgenre of detective fiction. Author Harper Lee even indulges our interestin the whodunit elements of the case,sprinkling in unexpected clues and surprisingbits of evidence, and allowing protagonistFinch the opportunity to show off his skillsof detection. Yet this is hardly a conventionalcrime story, and again and again the skincolor of witnesses and defendant loom largerthan the specifics of the alleged crime. Leeshows us that the residents of Maybcomb,Alabama may crowd into the courtroom withtheir enthusiasm for the spectacle at play intheir home town, but few of them have any interest in following the steps of reasoning that Finch employs in determining who actually assaulted Mayella Ewell. Their real concern is maintenance of the social hierarchy and local conventions of power and propriety.

We might be tempted, given this emphasis, to classify To Kill a Mockingbird as a political or socio-political novel. Yet the story of Tom Robinson, for all its centrality to the message of the work, accounts for less than half of Lee’s narrative. In fact, this story doesn’t emerge in any detail until readers are a hundred pages into the book. If we judged To Kill a Mockingbird by its opening chapters, we would assign it to a very different category. In these pages, Lee has presented a comic coming-of-age novel, filled with amusing scenes in the classroom and playgrounds of Maycomb.

Indeed, I can’t help but be reminded of that other novel—perhaps the greatest work of American fiction to come out of the South—which also involved an wise-beyond-his-years youngster as narrator amidst a story of racial tensions and difficult moral choices. Just as Mark Twain had achieved with Huckleberry Finn, Lee somehow manages to tell a very adult story from the perspective of a child. Jean Louis “Scout” Finch is around six years old when the novel begins, and even though she matures considerably during the two-year period covered in the book, she still remains a very unlikely character to take control of the narrative voice in a tale so filled with violence and the hypocritical power structures of pre-Civil Rights era Southern society.

Yet much of the power of this book derives from this uncharacteristic choice on Lee’s part. By putting an innocent child in the bird’s eye seat, Lee is able to lay bare the hypocrisy at play in Maycomb, Alabama. In many regards, a child notices much less than an adult, but Lee’s genius lay in realizing that in a few instances the youngster perceives more than grown-ups—and for the simple reason that the innocent youth is immune to the complicated excuses and rationalizations that societies use to justify their worst actions.

Have we answered the question we started with? Is To Kill a Mockingbird a penetrating coming-of-age story, which like Twain’s best work, combines humor and humility, satire and social commentary? Yes, but it is still more than that. In the book’s early chapters, Lee develops at great length the story of the enigmatic Boo Radley, who never leaves his family’s scary-looking house. Here Lee shows a unmistakable allegiance to the Southern gothic tradition of Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty. But at other junctures, I am reminded of the existential Southern fiction of Walker Percy, or the mocking and self-deprecating Bayou storytelling of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces. And there’s a bit of Truman Capote’s artful mixture of fact and fiction in these pages—in fact, one of the characters in To Kill a Mockingbird is modeled after Capote, who was Lee’s childhood neighbor and a lifelong friend.

I am forced to conclude that To Kill a Mockingbird is part and parcel of all these complex lineages. Perhaps more than any other book of its time, it combined all of the main traditions of Southern fiction into a single seamless work. Lee deserves our praise not just for taking this hodge-podge of sources and inspirations and turning them into a classic and bestseller, but even more for doing it with such aplomb and grace that we are hardly aware of the many different traditions at play in her writing. Even stranger, this same book managed to convey a rejection of much of the Southern heritage, at least of its tragic and unseemly side, even as it embodied every aspect of it.

As I mull over this achievement, I am tempted to complain about the stubbornness of an author who could pull this off, and then retire from writing and publishing (at least until greedy outsiders stepped in). Yet at the same time, I can only nod my head in agreement with her original decision. For it was hardly likely that Lee, or any other Southern writer, could have pulled off such a remarkable achievement a second time.

Ted Gioia writes on music, literature and popular culture. His latest book isLove Songs: The Hidden History, published by Oxford University Press.

Publication date: February 19, 2016

A Tribute to Harper Lee &Her Great Southern Novel

By Ted Gioia

Perhaps more than any other book of its time,To Kill a Mockingbirdcombined all of the main traditions of Southern fiction into a single seamless work.